“Colorado is the “highest of all the forty-eight states,” notes the back of this menu. “Forty-nine of Colorado’s peaks push skyward more than 14,000 feet above the level of the sea [today it is supposed to be 53, though some say 58], and literally hundreds of pinnacles in this mountain chain exceed 10,000 feet in elevation.” The mountains shown in the photo are called the Collegiate Peaks, specifically Princeton (14,204′), Yale (14,202′), and Harvard (14,421′) as seen from the town of Buena Vista (which Coloradans pronounce Byuna Vista).

Click image to download a 911-KB PDF of this menu.

This lunch menu is dated November 1946, which meant the railroad no longer had to guarantee that its prices followed federal price controls. In fact, they are about 50 percent higher than on this 1944 lunch menu. A salad bowl was 40¢ in 1944; 65¢ in late 1946. A table d’hôte lunch with a fish entrée was $1.00 in 1944; $1.40 in late 1946. Oddly, the fresh mountain trout, which was $1.25 in 1944, isn’t on this menu.

With this menu, I’ve now identified a total of 35 Rio Grande menus with glued-on color photos. I saw another one recently that had a Model A Ford on the cover which was created especially for some kind of Ford tour or convention, but I’m not counting that one as it wouldn’t have been used for ordinary passengers. Even before finding these two, this was the largest series of menus by any American railroad other than Union Pacific.

Like yesterday’s menu, this one had been cut up for insertion into a notebook. My restoration looks quite a bit better than yesterday’s effort. This was due more to luck than skill.